Privacy

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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Aleecia M. McDonald's research focuses on the public policy issues of Internet privacy, and includes user expectations for Do Not Track, behavioral economics and mental models of privacy, and the efficacy of industry self regulation. She co-chaired, and remains active in, the WC3’s Tracking Protection Working Group, an ongoing effort to establish international standards for a Do Not Track mechanism that users can enable to request enhanced privacy online. Read more » about Aleecia McDonald

Jennifer Granick is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Jennifer returns to Stanford after working with the internet boutique firm of Zwillgen PLLC. Before that, she was the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Jennifer practices, speaks and writes about computer crime and security, electronic surveillance, consumer privacy, data protection, copyright, trademark and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Read more » about Jennifer Granick

Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum. Read more » about Ryan Calo

Jonathan Mayer is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his J.D. in 2013. He was named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2014, for his work on technology security and privacy. Jonathan's research and commentary frequently appears in national publications, and he has contributed to federal and state law enforcement actions. Read more » about Jonathan Mayer

Last evening we learned that Rep. Dutch Ruppersburger (D-MD) plans to again reintroduce the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) at the start of the 114th Congress. Although it's impractical to speculate on the contents of the latest proposal without seeing its legislative language, if CISPA '15 simply is a mirror-image resubmission of last year's version (as I suspect it is) my previous comments about its shortcomings and controversies still remain relevant: Read more » about CISPA is back again. (Yes, again.)

Among the 400 gigabytes of internal documents belonging to surveillance firm Hacking Team that were released online this week are details of the company's dealings with some of the most oppressive governments in the world. The revelations, which have generated alarm among privacy, security, and human rights advocates, have also fueled debate around the esoteric but important topic of government controls on the export of powerful software that can secretly infiltrate and seize control of targeted computers.

"Privacy law expert Woodrow Hartzog, however, will push back on any effort to have a federal law override state rules. "Our critical data protection infrastructure will be weakened if federal legislation scales back protection, consolidates regulatory authority, and sets specific rules in stone," he said in written testimony."Read more » about House turns to anti-hacker fight

"Woodrow N. Hartzog, a law professor who studies privacy, said that without knowing more about how private companies use the Healthcare.gov data, it’s hard to tell how worried users of the site should be. “Are third-party recipients of this information allowed to share with other people?” he asked. “Are they under an obligation to keep from trying to re-identify that information” (that is, from trying to link data to people’s real identities)? “Without transparency,” he said, “it’s really difficult to know actually how concerned we should be about this.”"Read more » about Is Your Data Safe at Healthcare.gov?

Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. Read more » about Hate Crimes in Cyberspace

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Why is it bad when the government or companies monitor our reading or web-surfing? We have intuitions that this kind of surveillance is bad, but have failed to explain why digital monitoring in an age of terror and innovation is really a problem. In Intellectual Privacy, Neil Richards offers a new way of thinking about monitoring of our thinking, reading, and communications, one that ensures that our ideas and values keep pace with our technologies. Read more » about Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age

David Levine, a professor at Elon University School of Law, and Stephanie Blum, a founding partner at Reuben Racher & Blum, discuss a Manhattan Supreme Court Justice’s decision to allow a woman to serve her husband with divorce papers via a Facebook message. They speak with June Grasso and Michael Best on Bloomberg Radio’s “Bloomberg Law.” Read more » about Bloomberg Law: Using Facebook to Serve Divorce Papers